At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog ‘Should I Use AI for Writing? Please Don’t’. Eight months on, I stand by my plea. Here I go into a bit more detail as to why you should not use AI to assist you in your writing.
AI is an undeniable, irreversible presence in our lives. I use it as much as the next person, both intentionally and hidden in the various apps that use that technology. I use it to answer complicated questions a Google search can’t. I use it for research. I use it to interpret dreams. I use it to help plan itineraries or compare products and much more. It’s incredibly helpful.
However, I don’t, nor will I ever use it for any creative endeavours.
As a busy copyeditor, I have now had the chance to read multiple manuscripts where the authors have used AI to help them write. There is no judgement here. Most people will tell me, “I’m not a writer.” Or “I can’t write.” Or “I have no idea how to go about writing a book.” Most are transparent about their AI-writing use.
AI can take a messy manuscript, a tangled mountain of text or a dyslexic draft and convert it into a professional-sounding, well-organised book in minutes. It’s a dream come true. Or is it?
I can detect an AI-assisted manuscript within the first few paragraphs. And every time I do, I let out a huge sigh of frustration, disappointment and boredom.
Why?
While AI writing will deliver perfect syntax, grammar and punctuation, its style of writing, its tone, its vocabulary homogenises everyone’s voice. We are ending up with cookie cutter prose that ALL SOUNDS THE SAME.
All my clients have written unique, interesting, useful books, both fiction and non-fiction. There is never any doubt that the work is their own. I know they haven’t given AI a prompt and generated a book from virtually nothing. But what they have done is written their book with AI or run their book through AI, and though it might read well and sound impressive at first glance, it has ironed their words out into synthetic, uninteresting pages of uniformity.
How exactly do I know when a writer has used AI? AI writing has certain tells:
- Perfect grammar and punctuation—fine for the writer, but negates the need for an editor.
- Negative/positive sentence structure. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this structure, AI overuses it, resulting in a boring read.
- Love of certain words. ‘Quiet/ly’ is one of AI’s absolute favourites, and it drives me mad. A human writer can find dozens of different ways of saying ‘with quiet confidence’ or with ‘quiet courage’.
- Sentence fragments. AI loves one-word sentences or ones with no verbs and then a punchy conclusion. Again, not wrong, and it can be effective for pace; but when overused, it’s over the top and fatiguing.
- AI loves a cliché. It’s trained on human writing, and so it echoes them and thinks they’re clever. They’re not; they’re dull and tired.
- AI is not good at consistency. Its binary nature deals with small packages of information, and it can’t always remember or store what’s already happened.
- AI loves repeating itself. It will write the same idea in three different ways in three consecutive paragraphs.
- AI leans on using an introductory sentence, then a following sentence saying the same thing: E.g. The room became still and the atmosphere changed. The energy that had filled the room moments earlier drained away.
- AI creates books that are around 80–90000 words with a similar number of chapters, further proving a formulaic way of constructing a book.
- AI likes a quote at the beginning of each chapter in non-fiction books.
- AI will write some chapters in the most purple prose you’ve ever heard. E.g. I’ve stood in the wreckage of a stalled project, numbers bleeding red, and seen partnerships turn chaos into conquest. The strongest allies didn’t flinch—they plunged in, sleeves rolled, voices raw with candor, hammering out solutions as fiercely as we’d hammered steel.
I have come to the hard conclusion, as have many editors judging by Facebook threads, that I will rarely edit a manuscript written alongside AI. There is nothing in the technicalities of writing that I can improve. There is everything in the style and word choice and originality that I could improve. But that’s not editing, that’s rewriting, and that’s not my job.
I would rather edit a horrible manuscript than one with AI’s virtual fingerprints all over it. I would rather help my clients become better writers than let AI slaughter language and originality to make a writer’s life easier.
I’m not writing this because I’m worried about my job security (yet); I believe there will always be people who will avoid using these AI tools. I am worried about having a future of books that are mind-numbingly boring, unsophisticated and all sounding exactly the same.
I implore you not to use ChatGPT, Claude or the like to help you write your book. It doesn’t matter if you can’t write, it doesn’t matter if you can’t spell or punctuate—you’ll still be able to tell your story or share your experiences and knowledge with the nuance, emotion and uniqueness that only a human, only you, possess with, of course, the invaluable aid of a human editor.
